Anyone who’s visited the Green City Market in south Lincoln Park knows business is booming. A nonprofit dedicated to promoting sustainable agriculture, the market is packed with shoppers twice a week, and on a good day there are thousands. But its success has become a problem. The market has nearly quadrupled in size since its opening eight years ago, and as the crowds grew, “it wasn’t hard to see that we didn’t have enough farmers,” says founder Abby Mandel. Green City became a sensation–chef and market doyenne Alice Waters has called it the best sustainable market in the country–but demand was outstripping supply.
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So through a public-private initiative Mandel and Salazar created a job that’s not on any career test: farm forager. “I knew that there were food foragers for restaurants and so I thought ‘farm forager’ was perfect,” says Mandel. She encouraged Mari Coyne, whose agricultural work she’d been familiar with for several years, to apply for the job and officially hired her last June. If the title conjures the image of someone digging up farms out of the countryside, that’s more or less what Coyne does. She travels across the local agricultural region–northern and central Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Michigan–hunting down and enlisting farms. As with mushrooms, the art of farm foraging is all about knowing where to look: farming conferences, tip-offs from assorted contacts, meetings with recent agriculture program graduates or people who’ve inherited the family farm.
A graduate of the agricultural journalism and marketing department at the University of Wisconsin who grew up in Evanston, Coyne, now 41, worked for many years in the food industry and was one of the three friends who opened the Three Tarts Bakery in Northfield. A few years ago she went to a Buena Vista Social Club concert at Ravinia, and while running across the concrete to get to the front of the stage to dance, she tore the tendons in her foot. “[It] imploded,” she says. The injury sidelined her from the bakery for almost a year, and during that time she reevaluated her career. She decided to return to agricultural studies and, hoping to see “what a good local food system looks like,” temporarily moved to France in 2003, where short-term apprenticeships are more common than here. Over nine months Coyne worked on a dozen different farms in Normandy and Brittany, learning everything from beekeeping to millstone grinding to working a stand at a farmers’ market. The reality there, she says, is that “small farms are just as much on their way out as they are here.”
Although the city has earmarked funds to pay Coyne for only a year, Salazar hopes to be able to hire several more foragers soon; Mandel is pursuing grant money toward the same end. It’s unclear if or how the information Coyne has collected will be available to other nonprofits or residents who want to connect with local food sources, but Salazar stresses that his office works closely with outside groups. “We’re part of that movement,” he says, adding that he’s asking the same questions as sustainable agriculture advocates. “How do we develop a system where a percentage of school lunches comes directly from farmers? How does it go to the local grocery stores in the area?”
